Scream (9 page)

I don't remember being scared and I don't remember thinking I was only thirteen. Even though it was Swinging London in 1969, the Sharkeys weren't really part of it. They were just a nice, hip family who lived in Radlett, Hertfordshire. Dave had been the first Jewish boxer in the United Kingdom and was a follower of Gurdjieff. Anne, the mother, took me to Biba to get new clothes. Biba had just opened. I remember being very shocked by the fact that you had to change in a communal dressing room, but my mother had given me a small sum of money to go shopping and I had to try on the clothes. I bought an Empire-waist minidress in a Liberty of London print, another dress with a shirred front and puff sleeves, and a few other items, like a hat.

(By the time I got back to school in the U.S. that fall, I had outgrown the items, so I never really got to wear them much. And I did not realize that wearing clothing from Biba was not going to be normal in an Amherst regional junior high school in 1969. On the first day, a tiny man came running up to me and said, “Take off that hat at once!”

I laughed merrily. It was a large-brimmed red velour hat made by Madcaps. “Take off that hat and put it in your locker!” shouted the tiny man.

I thought he was the janitor. Besides, there was no rule against hats.)

In London we lunched at Cranks—the first trendy vegetarian restaurant—and Anne's friend Barbara was an editor at
The Ritz,
a kind of English equivalent of Andy Warhol's
Interview,
a newsprint underground paper.

It wasn't until 1976 that I went back for my junior year abroad. I had no money, but because the tuition in London was less than New York, my father paid. By the divorce decree he had to pay; he was supposed to pay for my graduate school, too, but he did not. Because of the cost, I dropped out of the Yale School of Drama (M.F.A. in playwriting) after a year, and it was years before I could pay back the student loans I had incurred.

Around the time I dropped out of grad school, Dad began billing me for my undergraduate education, sending letters stating what he had given me for food when the dining hall was closed on the weekends (he gave me fifteen bucks a weekend) or my annual budget for clothes ($250 a year).

But I didn't pay him back.

*
   Some years went by. I was an undergraduate at Barnard College. I was fixed up on a blind date? Met some guy in the student lounge? Anyway, we went out. He was Greek. We got to talking. I said I had lived in Israel. He said one summer when he was seventeen he had been in Israel. I said, “Some idiot broke my dog's leg.”

“Umm,” he said.

This poor guy. I still could not forgive him, and cursing, I left.

†
   Years later, while doing laundry, we did find unusual things in the washer or dryer. There appeared more than once a giant pair of women's underpants that could not possibly ever have belonged to either me or my mom, and another time, a man's tie. At that time I still lived at home; it wasn't like someone had been in the house and I hadn't seen him or her.

portrait of the artist with a young epiphany

E
ven in high school I wanted to be a writer. By then it was 1970 and my mom, brother, and I were living in Newton, Massachusetts. My mom decided she had to get away from that town of Amherst, Massachusetts, one year after we got back from Israel. She wanted to be near her sister, who lived in a big house in Newton Highlands. My mom found us a one-year sublet—the walk-up apartment of a widowed rabbi who had taken his own family to Israel for a year. It was a pretty bleak place, especially if you have been in the country most of your life. I had been used to the country and was not particularly happy in an urban environment. Newton Center was a grim, built-up area of small shops and apartments.

We survived in near poverty. Although my aunt and uncle had told my mother, after the divorce, that she should return to being a dietician (which is what she had been until she got pregnant with me, when she got fired, which is what happened to women back then), Mom did not want to. Even if she had wanted, she would have had to go back to school to be recertified.

She had already gone back to school and gotten an M.F.A. in poetry. It was a grant from the Radcliffe Institute that partially paid for our time in Israel. But unsurprisingly, jobs for poets were hard to find. She taught courses here and there in community colleges and high schools, which paid almost nothing, so she was forced to eke out an existence for three on the six grand we got from Dad. She had moved here to be near her sister, but her sister never called or called back or came over.

We never ate out or bought new clothes or went to the movies. Our special treat was buying books with the covers ripped off, for sale at the drugstore. Sometimes there was enough money to get a pound of hamburger meat. Then, using a little press with a lid, we divided the pound of meat into thirds, so that no one got more or less.

It was hard to visit Dad in his huge house with his freezer full of gourmet ice cream and his stereo system and dishwasher and indoor grill, his atrium and indoor fountain and floor-to-ceiling stone fireplace. Mom had to drive us halfway, then wait in the car, since he was invariably late. From our place in Newton to Dad's house was a three-hour ride each way, and at his house you worked. Vacuuming, mopping, preparing meals, clearing the table, gardening, clearing pathways. We always operated under a low (or high) level of rage; one never could do a job right or do enough to earn one's keep or behave in a way Dad liked. One summer I said I wanted to take a course in etymology at U. Mass, and Dad said I could live with him and study. When I got there it turned out he planned for me to pay for summer school myself.

I was fifteen and had neither a job connection nor a mode of transportation to get to a job, but Dad found an ad in the paper for jobs in a nightclub that was a former Quonset hut. He drove me there and left. I applied for a job as “hostess,” which of course I did not get. That's when Dad suggested I enter the wet T-shirt contest, but I was stubborn and fractious even then.

Without the funding to go to summer school, I returned to Newton and my mother's house. I got a job folding shirts at a discount store in a strip mall. At least there was bus service, albeit erratic.

Initially, the rabbi from whom we were now renting might have been some kind of romantic setup with Mom; I'm not sure. But they met and he took off, leaving some stuff behind in his apartment we now occupied. One day I opened a box. “Ma, what is this?” I asked.

“Oh!” said my mom, who had been brought up as an Orthodox Jew. “Those are the rabbi's phylacteries. His tefillin. Just shut the box and I'll put it away.” She was upset that I had found these items. This scared me a great deal. I did not know what phylacteries
were,
but just the sound of it made me realize I had done something wrong. I had opened a box of phylacteries! What the hell were they? To a modern kid you could probably say, “Those are sex toys!” and that kid wouldn't even blanch.

Like I keep saying, though, things were different then. I was maybe fourteen, fifteen, I don't know. Sometime after we moved in, I got—found, acquired, was given—paper panels from a billboard, new, that had never been hung. Each panel was huge. And I unfolded them, one by one, and pinned them on the living room wall. When they were installed they made a picture, a portion of this giant billboard that would have been, I don't know, five stories high on the highway. So now, one end of this living room was taken over by a huge photograph: ONE GIGANTIC EYE. The room of this dreary apartment did not look any better, but it was unusual. That living room now appeared even smaller, covered with part of a billboard of an eye at one end. Design-wise, it didn't really work, but that was my mother, who always let me do whatever I wanted. It was encouraging that I didn't have to follow rules.

Downstairs, there were two doorbells. One was for the downstairs half of the house, the other was for this rabbi's apartment. And I got a little can of red paint and I painted the button of each doorbell. They were matching doorbells, and now they had red nipples.

I'm sure those neighbors didn't like it, but they weren't Jewish and I doubt they had a way to reach the widowed rabbi in Israel. Anyway, what could they have said? “Your tenant's daughter painted the doorbells so now they look like nipples”?

They themselves were pretty rough, anyway; this was not a fine area of Newton, Massachusetts. This was for the people who lived in houses that got turned into apartments. The daughter who was my age spray-painted her name at the bus stop, and this was a long time before graffiti was in art galleries. Back then people who tagged were considered mentally ill or juvenile delinquents.

Ten years later, in New York City, spray-painting became a career choice, but 1970 was the year that the book
Love Story
by Erich Segal was published. That early graffiti tagger was reading it. One night I was downstairs there, and I read it, too. I thought it was a bad book, but I also thought
Catcher in the Rye
was stupid. (How much longer is that book going to remain an American classic, with that pretentious, obnoxious little prick Holden Caulfield dictating some odd version of honesty?) But now I would give anything to have written
Love Story.
Just saying.

The school I went to in Newton was part of a regular public school, but it was separate. It was an experimental school. You were supposed to teach yourself.

Some parts of the experimental concept worked. Not for stuff like math, though, or foreign languages, or science—so basically I missed ninth grade. I had already missed seventh, living in Israel, when I hardly went at all. At Weeks Junior High School—I forget the name of the experimental program—you didn't go to school at all one day a week but were supposed to work at a job that day. It could be volunteer or otherwise.

I found a volunteer job at the zoo, and spent a lot of time shoveling manure and other things. One day, the elephant keeper asked me to watch the baby elephant while she took a lunch break. She handed me a whole bunch of tiny bottles of Johnson's baby oil, the tiny travel-size ones, and told me to give the baby elephant a rubdown. Then she left.

This elephant was young, but already weighed hundreds of pounds and was as tall as me. The skin of the elephant was dry, thick, and bristly. It was in a big round pen and there was a crowd watching. I entered the round pen with the baby elephant. It was a hot day, and I was dressed only in shorts and a tank top. The elephant was naked.

I poured oil on the elephant. Now it was no longer dry but slippery, being massaged by a semi-naked fourteen-year-old. In the sun it was hot. Soon I was covered in oil, too.

The crowd watched with interest, growing in size.

Suddenly the three-hundred-pound baby elephant grinned, backed up, and came at me. It ran into me, slamming me full force with the top of its hot, heavily greased trunk.

Already slinky from spilled baby oil, punched in the stomach at full force, I was thrown up in the air and back, sending me down in front of the audience, which was now howling with laughter.

The wind was knocked out of me. So was any pride I had at being in charge of the baby elephant. I lay flat on my back for a few minutes before I scuttled out of the pen and staggered off.

mom becomes a boardinghouse landlady

H
ow would we survive? Mom wasn't earning any money and Dad was giving us hardly any.

The rabbi was due to return, so we needed a new place to live. My mother answered an ad for a job as a landlady for a house owned by some people in Lexington, Massachusetts. Now retired, the couple who owned the place were joining the Peace Corps, heading to Sierra Leone and leaving behind their dog and their youngest son, who had not yet moved out, along with a bunch of tenants renting rooms in the back half of the house. We moved in before the couple went on their adventure, so they could show us the ropes.

It was a big ramshackle Victorian house in a fancy town. The tenants kept to themselves, except for the owners' son, in his early twenties, who took all his food to his room, where he saved it under the bed. He only came downstairs to clean his guns and rifles at the kitchen table.

Then there was the neighbor. She had been having an affair—for twenty years—with the man who had gone away to Sierra Leone with his wife. Now lonesome for her boyfriend, and irritated by her own husband, she liked to come over, unannounced, especially when her son returned to live with them, bringing his team of sled dogs.

One day my mom made a very fancy lasagna and left it on the counter. When she came back, it appeared to have been elegantly sliced down the middle. The whole front half was gone. There were various people under suspicion. First was the rifle-cleaning son, who left chicken bones under his bed, followed by the neighbor, who we believed suspected my mom of having an affair with the man who had gone to Sierra Leone with his wife (she wasn't).

Our paranoia grew until one day when we came into the kitchen we discovered that the house dog (we were also looking after him for the year) was able to reach high enough to devour food left on the counter, depending on how close to the edge it was positioned. In a sense this was a bit of a disappointment. Nobody wants to have their paranoia shoved down their throat, not when you can blame a neighbor for sneaking in and eating half your casserole.

The dog's name was Brahms and he was a semi-poodle. He was an early evolutionary prototype of a labradoodle or a goldendoodle, before these hybrids existed, and because of his early stage on the evolutionary scale, he felt no shame about leaning over onto the counter. I am sure later hybrids had more brains, or else this breed would not have survived. But it was too late: once various suspicions have been raised, the enemy is out there.